(Article link at end of posting)
Recent news in UK have centred around the increasing number of First Class degrees, the high passing rate including students with desperately poor commands of English (eg lots of Masters students), students & staff at a university being advised to inflate their opinions of the institution in the National Students Survey (which, incidentally, my university did very well in despite my doubts about their actual performance, the objectivity of the very survey, and the students who did it), as well as allegations of examiners both external and internal keeping quiet about lax standards and bad practices, and staff being advised to ensure good pass & degree-scoring rates.
All this is demeaning the degree and teaching but nobody is willing to raise a concrete issue. Why? This is a very diffficult subject to broach. Which student would complain if it might mean his marks get lowered? His degree class might be put in jeopardy, his future job prospects might be affected. A lecturer with low pass rates in an exam could face difficulties as that may mean his teaching is perceived to be poor, students will rate him lowly, and his reputation and job prospects would be hit if his university was revealed to have poor standards. The reality is that a lot of universities try to enhance their own image and that is best done by good degree awards, high pass rates, great "student satisfaction", strong employment figures, high research rating, good investment in facilities etc. As a business the best way to enhance their bottomline (and ranking on the league tables) would be to 1) award more good degrees 2) make sure more people pass 3) admit lots of fee-paying foreign students. Point 3 alone may mean that incoming standards need to be lowered to ensure a larger share of the foreign student market becomes accessible.
In the not too distant past I was a student at the University of Leicester, and found that while it was a decent university there was a lot of poor lecturing going on, coursework submission was not marked to a good or consistent standard, exams were sometimes bordering farcical, and a lack of genuine concern about standards. In reality these problems are embedded quite deeply into the system. I am sure there are universities much worse. And surely I would not want to demean my own degree, but I must say my First Class could have done with a bit more work and less time-wasting. If I had been in a highly-competitive institution like Imperial College or Cambridge it would certainly have been more difficult to achieve the grades I did.
One fine day as I was approaching the end of my course I happened to chat with the president of a society I was in, and we agreed our degree/exam standards left much to be desired. We made an agreement that, after we graduated, we would each email the head of department and let our feelings be known. Some time later I spoke to him again and both of us had not written that email. Student apathy, they say, but really it does have a bit of inertia involved.
Not too long ago I read that the university had relaxed its degree-scoring criteria. It used to require 70% outright for a 1st Class degree, but that was lowered to 68% with additional leeway for consideration. To me, that was an outright indication of a drop in standard. Obviously it would have been easier for them to set simpler papers but perhaps apprehension about tinkering with something that might be externally-assessed made them decide on this classification, which was entirely up to them to decide upon.
Some courses are fundamentally more difficult, for example law and medicine, where it can get quite clear-cut if a student was incompetent. However in the sciences where it is exam-based, or even in the arts where an essay is subjective and easily plagiarised (undetectable if done in the right way), there is a lot of scope for incompetent students to work in. First of all, we had a Quality course in which the lecturer was a Professor who taught the concepts but skipped the details, and told us the exam "usually" included a question on some topic. The irony! In fact one didn't have to listen to his veiled comments, as a quick peek at the past papers revealed enough. In each of the last 4 or 5 years recurring questions came out, some with different numbers substituted (for calculation questions), or some even unchanged (usually open ended questions). In my year a calculation question came out and it had the same figures as a past question - he didn't even bother to adjust those figures. Another two essay questions were an exact copy of past years'. We still had people failing the exam, but that's where I go into my next point. By and large it is now very difficult to fail a subject, and the fact that even with such divine intervention a student could fail would tell us that he didn't deserve to get to third year. I can tell you, even a perfunctory glance at the course notes would have been rather sufficient to cover the 24% of coursework knowledge required to pass the exam.
This is just one example of lax standards, albeit one rather extreme.
I am proud of my degree in terms of having passed well, but not proud of the way in which it was attained. I could really have done with a much harsher development path.
See here for an excellent article about poor admission standards
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/7358528.stmJust look at the comments, including some from academics at top universities. Each comment is in agreement with the views presented in the article. So it must be biased. Why?
Because the students who've been alleged against may never be able to string together enough words in English to sufficiently convey their opposition, let alone bother to read the article in the first place...
More articles on the right pane. Feel free, especially the excellent
E-mail leak of 'degree inflation'.
